A Writer's Ghostly Inspirations

By

Arthur Phillips

Updated April 23, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

As a small boy on a family trip to Jamaica, I was taken to Goldeneye, the former home of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. The lush landscape of his Oracabessa estate impressed the grown-ups. But I was looking for secret weapons, or Barbara Bach, the actress whose recent appearance in the 007 film "The Spy Who Loved Me" had ignited in me a burning interest in becoming an international man of mystery.

Neither form of bombshell was found. But I did discover something: If the man who had lived there had created my boyhood hero and that goddess, there must be something almost holy about the place. (I actually should've been learning to drum; the Bond Girl married Ringo Starr.) It was an accidental discovery, but from then on, I was hooked on dead men's homes.

The plaque-adorned edifice. The museum dedicated to a fallen great. The "Here Lies" tomb: these destinations attract a very specific kind of tourist. We are searching for that elusive thrill, that zap of inspiration that the "remains" of someone important are presumed to evoke. We travel to remote places, hoping for a flickering communion with our dead heroes. We wager that their headstones, preserved letters and velvet roped-off beds will transport us back to them, let us feel what they felt.

And when the accidental "moment" happens, it can be uplifting. That bridge to the past can appear out of nowhere, solidly constructed, even on nearly nothing at all. I was initially disappointed, for instance, when I misread my guide book and arrived at the closed museum dedicated to the great 19th-century composer Erik Satie in Montmartre, Paris. That spring day, all I discovered was a blue Parisian plaque on the wall: Satie lived and composed here. But that meant he stood here, too, on this very doorstep, in front of this very locked door. He smelled these spring leaves. And, amazingly, that was all it took. I walked away whistling one of his Gymnopédies, inspired to create something in his spirit. I was every bit as contented, I suspect, as if I'd been allowed inside, seen a little piano or a yellowed draft of his compositions.

I longed for similar heart palpitations on a recent trip to Stratford-upon-Avon. Stratford's favorite son William Shakespeare, with whom I share a birthday Saturday, is one of my favorite writers. I was hungry to feel his presence, or posthumous approval, in my tourism.

I paced outside his grammar school, but wasn't permitted in, as contemporary Stratford youth were using it for their education. I saw the country house of his wife's family. I glanced at a chair purported to be the one Shakespeare wooed her from. It was all very real, but it didn't provoke what I'd hoped for. I couldn't place myself alongside him in that glove workshop (where he apprenticed his father), or in the fields where he may have dreamt up the faeries from "A Midsummer Night's Dream." I could not cross the chasm of those centuries. Shakespeare may very well have lived in this house, but it wasn't the same now, amidst the car traffic and pedestrians in athletic gear. What he saw and heard in this house was unrecoverable for me, no more or less imaginable here than when I was in a room in Brooklyn, a book in my hand. I left these sites entertained, educated, intrigued, but not visited.

However, I did feel Shakespeare's ghost—walking, working, living—in, of all places, a circa-1996 replica of the Globe Theatre (located a few blocks from where the original had stood), the labor of love of American actor Sam Wanamaker.

There, I was fortunate enough to be toured through the empty theater by David Crystal, the great Shakespearean linguist. I was allowed up on stage, backstage and down into "Hell," below stage. I walked its yard, touched the boards from down where the groundlings would've drank (and relieved themselves) and listened. I gazed at the painted heavens under the canopy while Crystal, in Elizabethan dialect, marched across the platform and recited the prologue to Act I of "Henry V."

How easily it worked for me, that speech pleading for imagination, how quickly I flew to that other, nearby stage of the 1600s, jarred and jostled, sensing my hero close by.

What do I hope for on my own memorial? (A middle-age writer can dream.) "On This Site, Arthur Phillips (1969-2099) Struggled With His Mortgage, Held Out Hopes for the Minnesota Twins (1961-) and Drew Inspiration From His Heroes."

—Mr. Phillips's latest novel "The Tragedy of Arthur" was published this week; it includes what purports to be a previously unknown King Arthur play by William Shakespeare.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.